One thing that I noticed this week is different ways to make assessments. Normally, when we assess the students for social studies or science, we give the students a paragraph of information that is not new to them. It is information that we have gone over that week, and the goal of the assessment is to see if students can extract information from the reading to answer the questions. This week, we gave the students a sumative assessment on our Mexico Unit. Before the assessment, I played a review game with the students. Each question that would be on the assessment was in the game. The questions may have had the same wording, or in different words, however, the students were able to tell me the correct answer when I gave them choices. For this sumative assessment, students did not have a paragraph at the top of their assessment, as the formative assessments had, but just questions with fill in the blanks and a word bank at the top. I first read the choices of words in the word bank. Then, I read the sentence and gave the students time to write in the answer. About half of the students did well with this, however the students who struggle with reading did not do well with this. I walked around to students and read the sentence. When it came time to the blank, I read a few words from the word bank, with the correct answer in the words I said. The students had no problem finding the answer this way.
For future assessments, I feel as though it would be beneficial for students to have multiple choice assessments, until they are able to read the whole sentence and word bank words on their own. This is a case of changing the way we write assessments, to see what is better for the students. By writing our assessments like this until the students become better readers will ease the students from having to choose between ten words in the word bank, especially when some students are unable to read the words to begin with. Having these assessments would also help prepare students for standardized tests in the future.
I think there are other ways to experiment with this as well. I think what is important here is that you are beginning to experiment with different types of assessments and how these different ways of asking students questions might reveal different types of understandings. This is something that you can continue to do throughout this internship year.
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